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JIHAN MCDONALD
Facilitator. Writer. Ritualist.
Jihan McDonald
Empathy. Honesty. Curiosity. Courage.
The earliest lesson I remember learning, moral or otherwise, is from my father. He is an internal refugee from Jim Crow Alabama who left with the Great Migration, coming west to California at the beginning of Freedom Summer. He had taught himself Spanish through a dictionary and conversations in the barrios
of Los Angeles, his first encounter outside of the world of Black and White, and raised me on what he knew. “A language is a perspective, Chiqi, when you learn someone’s language you learn about what the world means from their perspective,” he would say, and then, “Me entiendes? (do you understand me?).” I like to think that I do.
It has helped to have the priceless experiential education of growing up in the deep diversity of Oakland, attending a majority White and wealthy private school, attending an all female historically Black college, completing graduate studies at a seminary specializing in queer and liberation theology, living in different cities and countries, and learning languages that have given me access to encountering and experiencing many different realities and world views.
My institutional education includes include a B.A. in Spanish Language & Culture with an International Studies minor; an M.A. in Social Transformation; certificates in Life Coaching, Capacitar Stress & Trauma Release, Poetry, and Kingian Nonviolence; training in the Work That Reconnects, mindfulness meditation, Convergent Facilitation, Nonviolent Communication, and UnTraining anti-racist education.
I have/been chosen to be a transformational facilitator, intuitive healer, and creative writer as a career but my most important chosen life path has been that of a humane being. I work for the evolution of human beings into humane beings, a co-creator of sustainably holistic peace. My experiences of personal and societal trauma, and what is needed to heal from it, have imbued me with a deep drive for “positive peace” on both intimate and communal levels.
I have studied from and collaborated with internationally recognized experts in their fields of social activism, scholarship, theology, healing, and art in my personal and professional development. My methodology and praxis of community building and radical allyship, developed at the crossroads of my education and my experiences, has been adopted by schools, nonprofits, and community organizations in their efforts to develop anti-oppressive cultures and practices. I have the deep honor to be trusted as a truth-teller.
